There comes a time when Kings and Emperors must heed a certain call. The call of their people, their voices, their hopes and above all their fears. The duly elected Monarch Manohar stands on the edge of a very rocky precipice. Behind him are people who are fearful, that the ghosts of communalism would play their part on the stage of Goa, a ghost which Parrikar had managed to exorcise in 2012 and again in 2014, when the spectre of this ghost loomed larger, that being Modi’s coronation election.
In the last two months, by design more than accident, they have returned. And they are for real. As Muthalik threatened, provoked, teased and warned, of his intentions of moving to Goa and set up the Muthalik moral policing and action academy, Manohar ignored, avoided, tided over and perhaps even prayed that this would be a passing shower. And then there was Sudin Dhavalikar, Muthalik’s local representative and the de-facto patriarch of the Sanathan Sanstha, proven to be a card carrying member of the family of right wing polarisation. The PWD minister kept the seat warm as Muthalik went on a consolidation spree.
Muthalik said he would teach pub going folks a lesson by destroying these temples of vice, Manohar kept quiet. Muthalik announced that he would distribute a sword in each Hindu home at a speech and reiterated that in Belgaum when Herald interviewed him. Manohar not only kept quiet, he quashed a case against him for uttering these words without any further investigation, while an anti Modi rant regular on Facebook got picked up.
Once this round was over, Sudin and Deepak took over and starting from wanting to ban biknis to expressing confidence of India becoming a Hindu rashtra. However, Goa, with its inate optimism that its 500 year old secular fabric would net hate mongers, felt that Goa’s Chief Minister would never let a Muthalik become larger than life.
But Parrikar has shown exemplary weakness in letting the Ram Sene Chief Pramod Muthalik have a free run of word speech and action culminating in his organisation moving court to stop a tiatr performance directed by popular tiatrist Tousif de Navelim, “Atankvadi Goeant Naka”.
It is believed that the tiatr would be targeted at, what a man like Muthalik espouses and bring to the table, cutting at the fabric of society. Let us remember that tiatrists take over when the system fails. They are our village heroes, our voices, our platforms. Does the Chief Minister believe that if he fails as the Chief Executive of the state to prevent the build up of communal tensions, the rod of art, writing and tiatr will keep quiet.
The threat of the Ram Sene to take law into their hands, under the tutelage of their own DGP Muthalik and their demand that there should be a censor board for Tiatr, is directly aimed at polarising.
The Chief Minister has a problem here. Tousif Sheikh happens to be a Muslim and the Sene has directly attacked his community labelling the community as terrorists. At the same time he is a popular Goan tiatrist, with a following among Catholics, especially from Salcete.
It is a measure of immense political immaturity along with administrative weakness that the Chief Minister allows this divide to grow, just to allow someone from the larger “parivar” political space to play his game of hatred.
If he does not step in and quell Sri Ram Sene and ask Pramod Muthalik to step back and allow Tousif’s tiatr to be staged, Parrikar will be pressing a crucial button which will begin the downward spiral of his flight which has reached the halfway mark on its route path.
